Everything was better in my day. I used to roll my eyes when I heard grown-ups say that. Now that I am among them, at nearly 40, I’m inclined to agree.
Just look at the Noughties, when we were free to be carefree, when it wasn’t a criminal offence to offend someone, and if you identified as a pansexual teapot you’d be thoroughly frowned upon.
One fragment of that decade is due to come around again, at least, and that’s the uniform.
According to researchers at Northwestern University, Illinois, who examined nearly 160 years’ worth of women’s clothing, the old adage that all fashion comes back into style on a 20-year rotation is bang on.
Which means we can soon expect a revival of low-rise flared jeans, chunky belts and bandage dresses.
Those can stay in the Noughties thank you very much, but 2006 can school us in more than just peak-WAG fashion trends. Reflecting on that period, actress Emily Blunt said recently: ‘I miss the irreverence, the swing, the attitude.’
She was talking about the 2006 era-defining movie The Devil Wears Prada, and added: ‘The meanness was delicious… it can be such a relief now to laugh at something inappropriate.’
I was in my first year at Bristol University in 2006, pairing my low-rise jeans with tight rock-band T-shirts from artists I didn’t listen to, my hair burnt to a crisp by the daily GHD straightening and my skin polluted with fake tan.
I smoked, drank like a sailor and attended very few lectures.
The Devil Wears Prada actress Emily Blunt said recently of the Noughties: ‘I miss the irreverence, the swing, the attitude’
It’s a bittersweet time to look back on, given I have nothing left of it. The jeans are long gone, along with my tiny waistline, my best friend at the time hasn’t talked to me in a decade and my boyfriend from back then is dead.
Along with many of the freedoms we all had: chief among them the ability to speak our minds without fear of getting cancelled.
In the Noughties, I devoured clips of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens denouncing religion, and had many impassioned debates with friends regarding my atheism. None of the believers took offence, or pilloried me on social media.
Today, Dawkins is regularly ostracised from academic settings for what is wrongly perceived as an ‘anti-Islam’ stance, as Hitchens would be if he were still alive.
It simply didn’t matter then whether or not we agreed. I genuinely couldn’t tell you how most of my fellow student chums voted at the time. How refreshing! That we didn’t have to wear our politics on our foreheads.
This didn’t last long. My half-siblings are only about a decade younger than me, but by the time they went to university it was a vastly different climate – ruled with zeal by the Left, with no room for nuance or discourse, and anyone on the Right disqualified.
I love my siblings dearly but I find it sad that we can’t mention certain subjects – feminism, the Covid vaccine and gender identity among them – around the dinner table, let alone discuss them.
The Noughties were far from perfect, of course – my rose-tinted spectacles aren’t that opaque.
That ‘meanness’ that Blunt recalls could be pretty brutal. The way Heat magazine – our weekend bible – dissected celebrities’ cellulite and essentially drove poor Britney Spears insane would not be tolerated today, and we’re better for it.
I will concede that the way some men flirted in the Noughties was overly aggressive. On one occasion I resorted to lobbing a suitor’s phone out of my dorm room window so that he’d get his hands off me and leave.
My friends and I laughed about it the next day, and his reputation as one of the most popular boys went unscathed.
Richard Dawkins was revered in the Noughties – but now he is regularly ostracised from academic settings for what is wrongly perceived as an ‘anti-Islam’ stance, writes Annabel Fenwick-Elliott
Alongside over-amorous mating rituals, there was certainly more overt bullying when I was growing up.
People were ruder, and got away with it. But have we all become a lot nicer, really? I’m not so sure.
I’d argue that the likes of Greta Thunberg are just as abrasive today, under the guise of being do-gooders. Eco-zealots will gladly key your Tesla over something inflammatory Elon Musk blurted out on a whim.
Whenever I post anything remotely contentious on X, I get death threats. If that isn’t bullying, I don’t know what is.
Hostility in modern times is often more subtle. I recall one of my friends was so dismayed when I dared to question the actions of the Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 that I got the silent treatment for weeks.
I miss the times back in my university era when she might just have called me an insensitive meanie and moved on.
More than anything, though, what irks me is the mass hysteria that has bred like a virus these days on both sides.
In 2006, J. K. Rowling was a revered author. Today, she’s branded a terf (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and none of us are allowed to enjoy Harry Potter any more.
People today, it seems to me, care too much about everything.
So if we must tolerate the resurgence of unflattering jeans from 20 years ago, let it return with some much needed irreverence. And even the right, perhaps, to laugh at something inappropriate.
